


Director's Cut #1 - Zeroth Law Dead Ends

by MysteryMuse



Series: Random Access Memory [14]
Category: Rockman X | Mega Man X
Genre: Axl cockblocks again, Deleted Scenes, M/M, Maverick X, OTP Feels, Reploid brainsex, The Zeroth Law
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-04 08:58:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1773301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MysteryMuse/pseuds/MysteryMuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything Zero knew, everything he had was in ruins - even X.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Director's Cut #1 - Zeroth Law Dead Ends

**Author's Note:**

> Deleted scene from The Zeroth Law, after X returns to the tower as a "Maverick" and the battle with the Pantheons ends. The story didn't really have time or space for this kind of thing, Zero took a path in the story that was much more appropriate to his character, and this scene just didn't match the mood or urgency of the rest of the story. But it's kind of cute as a look at a different path that could have been, as a potential redirection of Maverick!X and Zero's relationship and all, and I still snicker at the ending. 
> 
> I really wish I'd written way more X/Zero fluff overall, though...

"It figures," X sighed, picking up a badly burned book from the floor and leafing through its pages. The edges were charred and black, making the story impossible to follow, and the blue Maverick set it down gently atop a table coated in fresh plaster dust. "I waited so long to get back here - back home- and the whole place is destroyed the minute I arrive."  
  
"Welcome to my life," Zero answered, standing in the middle of the room and looking flustered. "It took me years to get some of this stuff." He took a step forward, stopped, and shook his head, blond hair rippling against his spine. "I know it's all just useless crap but it was my useless crap."  
  
X made a sympathetic sound and continued to trawl along the edge of the room, running his fingers along the wall, a stranger in a place that he should have known.  
  
Zero mournfully took inventory. A few small items remained, and he gathered these up to pack with the other remnants in an open storage locker near the door. _Putting what's left of me in a box. What else is new?_  
  
When he finished he turned and saw X crouch and pluck something out of the debris, a small black picture frame. Zero flinched and scrambled over, brain already beginning to race as he tried to figure out how to explain.  
  
The picture was one of himself and X from _five? Six?_   Years ago. A happy moment someone had captured without telling them and then teased Zero about in a ruthless manner until he managed to win the 'evidence' back in a series of high-octane drinking games. It'd been summer, they were messing around, swinging each other around like kids, big smiles on their faces, sun on their armor and shining in their hair. It was one of Zero's few precious memories.  
  
And the X that was in that picture wasn't the one standing in the room with him. That X had been a fake, all along.  
  
X handed him the photograph without a word. There was a crack down the center of the frame, splitting the inseperable pair in the image apart.

Zero took it and stammered, "X, I..."  
  
"It's all right." X lied, and Zero knew it. "I-it's just hard to accept that someone else had my life for so long- the life I should have had with you, Zero. I should have been in that picture, smiling like that. He stole that from me. The _humans_ stole that from me. Your memories are full of a me that isn't myself. And now because of him, you and I can't..."  
  
Zero's hands were shaking, and he couldn't stop that. He didn't care. "X, don't. You'll just hurt yourself, thinking like that."  
  
The blue Maverick lifted weary green eyes to Zero's and whispered. "Kiss me."  
  
Zero blinked, feeling heat rush to his face. "I want to," he murmured, stepping closer to X. The strange ozone the blue Maverick's body produced enveloped him like a sweet, strange perfume. But Zero was terrified to actually do it, because doing it meant acceptance of so many things. That the X he'd known for so long, the X that he'd loved, had _never been real_. That the true X, for whom he'd given his life twice, had been sealed in pain and darkness for nearly two decades, and he'd failed to save him.  
  
Everything he knew, everything he had was in ruins- even X. "I want to," Zero said, vocoder clotted, the words thick in his throat. The temptation to turn his back, to hide his face from X, was almost overpowering. "I can't."  
  
X shook his head. The steel in his eyes - which Zero only now understood was a foot-thick layer of grief - descended across his face and he drew himself upright. "Zero." Not commanding, not yet, not quite ready to. But so close.  
  
Zero's brows rose, but a current of heat flickered down his spine, and he felt his core start to squirm. Angry. Anxious. Wanting. Ready to tear itself apart for something _true_. "Mavericks don't ask for things- they _take_ them," he rasped, running his tongue over his lips.  
  
X did the same, possibly unconscious mimicry, and stepped in close until their chestplates touched. X slid his hands along Zero's waist, and snaked one arm tightly around. He shifted the other into his buster, and Zero startled at that, making a small noise.    
  
X tapped Zero's temple gently with the barrel. He smiled imperiously, a haughty thing. "Something like this?"  
  
Zero bared his teeth- but his grin was feral and intent under sparking blue eyes. "Something like that. But now that I have a gun to my head, I'm not likely to move. 'fraid you'll have to mnnf."  
  
X was a good kisser. Need had made him fearless, and Zero rumbled eagerly along his tongue, kissing back firmly with a muffled purr of encouragement. After the initial shock, Zero's regrets began to dissolve. X - the real one, this time- was amazing enough to die for- shouldn't it be okay to live for him, too?  
  
"Take your helmet off," X demanded. Zero did so, half gasping, unleashing a flurry of gleaming blond hair that X was quick to yank from its clip and wind his fingers through. He tipped Zero's head back and peppered his throat with his mouth, and somewhere in the low sounds that Zero was making and the spark that moved between their synthskins when they touched, X realized something important.  
  
Zero hadn't touched him. Not at all, not even a brush of his fingers. He frowned and pulled back, waiting for Zero to surface from the haze of lust enough to register the change.  
  
"X, I...what?"  
  
"Use your hands."  
  
Zero struggled to process this. "... to do what?"

When X's jaw clenched, Zero protested, "X, I _can't_..." And then he turned a darker red, shamed. "Dammit, you don't..." He struggled. _That was then. This is now. But I'm coded_... "X, you have to tell me exactly what you want me to do. I'm... kind of... locked. We, that X and me... when we get like this." He sucked in air in a hiss, tried again. It wasn't like him to trip over his own damn tongue. "I'm not supposed to touch you without permission."  
  
X gave him the strangest look - mingled horror, surprise and pity. The question were there in his eyes, but he didn't say them: _you let him do that to you?_

Zero shrugged it off as best he could, reaching for his usual nonchalance to hide the feeling that X's eyes were stripping him _naked_. "I trusted," was all he could finally get out, and he brought his eyes up, staring at X, trying to make him _see_.

Considering this, X tilted his head and thought. "How precise, exactly, was that coding, and what subsystems were they keyed to?" Something flashed across his face then - a kind of tender impish light. The back of Zero's head started to tingle, and he felt X sliding gracefully into his subsystems - effortless, perfectly connecting.

Zero's soul fluttered wildly. _That look... that warmth, something that isn't grief or pain..._ He caught his breath as the Maverick easily picked apart the few thin threads of code seperating them, and slid into the space left behind, whispering in codebeats from inside Zero's head, _mine_. _always mine. **only** mine._ _even when it wasn't me, it was still you and me. **forever**. now hold me, damn it._

Zero would have shook his head at himself under other circumstances, but he was synchronized with X, X's need and longing flooding through every line in the connection they shared. He gave a choked little noise and flung his arms around X, shot through with more emotion than he could possibly control. He was not built to cry; he pushed his face against X's neck and sobbed anyway, breaking open, fingers sliding up and down X's back over and over.

X let Zero cry - actually pushed him to, pushed on his systems, opened up every hidden pocket of Zero's scarred heart, with a grip of velvet and steel. He drained Zero's memory of the other X and replaced himself in the same context, transforming Zero's memories, making them safe and clean, making them correct to _him_. It was a small shift; it was a million tiny surgeries; it was a revolution. And X didn't let up until everything was changed, until Zero was wiped clean, until their union was once again a secret jewel of shimmering perfection. 

Zero came up for air, trembling. X had elevated him into a state of clarity, a place beyond the roil of emotions that always burned under his thoughts, and it was a place he'd only ever been once before in his life, but a place he knew instinctively was his true state. He felt nothing, but it was a glorious perfect emptiness, better than feelings. The world seemed to be haloed in white and blue light, and when he looked at X, he saw a crown of liquid colors turning slowly above his head. He was pure. _They_ were pure. Nothing else in the world mattered. It never had. There had never been anything else. He felt like he could fly. 

His mouth opened, and he reached for X and pulled him close. Their lips crackled, energy rippling between them. X nudged the lens of his Buster under Zero's chin.

Which was exactly the wrong moment for Axl to bumble in on. Passing down the hall with an armful of recovered books, he happened to glance into the room. He dropped the books, gasping in alarm. Zero's helmet was off and X had a gun on him, and Zero looked blank-eyed, like he wasn't in his body. "Zero!" He leapt into the room, shoving Zero and X apart and bringing up his twin guns, locking onto X. "What are you doing, X?"  
  
Zero crashed back to earth, back into himself - _hard_. "AXL, you moron!" He smacked the younger Reploid upside the head- and didn't pull his punch that time.  
  
Axl blinked, whirling on the red Hunter, eyes wide. "Ow! What'd I do? What? He had a gun on you!"  
  
X, flustered and startled, had fled as soon as Axl had targeted him. Zero growled, pondered going in pursuit, but the fragile mood they'd been building was all shot to hell anyway, and now he had potent electrochemicals primed for sharing and roaring in his brain that he had no way to disperse. He was in for one mother of a headache.  
  
"Zero, what? What was going on there?"  
  
"Grown-up robot stuff. Out!" Zero bellowed at the newgen, hunting around wildly for- well, all of his furniture was in ruins, but there was at least the shell of a chair left, and he slumped into that, massaging his temple with his fingertips.   
  
"Wait, that was... you guys were..." Axl's eyes went even bigger.  
  
"Which you interrupted. So _out_ , unless you intend to take his place,"  Zero snarled. His core was pulsing, sore and swollen, and it hurt.  
  
Axl looked skeptical, tapping his lips with his fingertip. Zero desperately tried not to notice how similar they were to X's. "Well, I dunno. Never tried it that way before... I don't think it would WORK, would it? I mean, how do you, y'know, you don't have the connectors?" 

" _Get. OUT!"_


End file.
